[UPDATE: Director of Mayor Edwin M. Lee’s Communications Office Christine Falvey comments: “The caption must have been a joke. He has not attended any such events. The photo was taken at the Giants game last week.”]

Is this photo (or its caption) newsworthy? I don’t know.

But certainly, the fact that Mayor Edwin Lee was present at a “re-elect Ed happy hour” before last week’s 6-5 victory over the San Diego Padres is news to me.

Did you know that the state of California subsidizes movie production Down Hollywood Way to the tune of $100,000,000 a year? Well, some people want the Sacramento to cut off this source of movie funding for films that depict smoking, that’s the news of the day.

Did The Social Network glamorize smoking as far as you remember? I don’t recall, but it will win a few Oscars on Sunday so it’s as good a target as any, I s’pose. Here’s the closest I could find to a still that has somebody smoking:

(Hey, why does California subsidize film production in the first place? Shouldn’t Jerry Brown or somebody cut off this kind of corporate welfare tout de suite?)

That’s the contradiction spotlighted in separate letters to the California Film Commission released today from Jonathan Fielding, MD, director of L.A. County’s Department of Public Health, and Michael Ong, MD, chair of the Tobacco Education and Research Oversight Committee, which is mandated by the legislature to guide state tobacco prevention efforts.

Dr. Fielding’s letter, dated January 14, notes that two recent Sony blockbusters, The Social Network and Burlesque, both rated PG-13 and featuring tobacco imagery, qualified for more than $12 million in California tax credits through a $100 million a year program that began its payouts on January 1, 2011. (The two films have grossed $135 million so far.) “Any benefit that tobacco-related subsidies for films might have for California’s interstate competitiveness must be balanced against proven, catastrophic ‘collateral damage’ to young audiences and long-term health costs to the state,” the letter says.

Dr. Ong’s letter, dated February 18, reports that “approximately 44 percent of adolescent smoking initiation can be attributed to exposure to onscreen smoking” and 100,000 high school students in California are currently smokers as a result of this exposure. “It is unconscionable that one state program threatens to undermine our state’s public health achievements and goals, our investment in tobacco prevention, and our savings in health care costs, particularly in a time of declining state revenues,” the letter says.

Both letters urge that future film projects with smoking be made ineligible for taxpayer subsidies in California. Similar reforms are advocated by health groups in New York, New Mexico, Ontario and British Columbia, all major sources of film production subsidies. In 2008, U.S. states granted an estimated $500 million in production subsidies to youth-rated films with smoking, rivaling the $518 million they will spend for tobacco prevention in 2011.

Also today, the Smoke Free Movies campaign based at University of California, San Francisco, published a full-page ad in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter noting that two-thirds of Oscar®-nominated films this year include smoking and forty percent of these are rated PG or PG-13. The ad centers on the new animated film Rango (Viacom: Paramount and Nickelodeon) opening March 4. Headline: “How many studio execs did it take to OK smoking in a ‘PG’ movie?” California already makes animated films ineligible for public subsidy. The ad can be seen at www.smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/ourads/index.html.

SOURCE University of California, San Francisco, Smoke Free Movies Initiative

Anyway, the upshot is that quitting Facebook is easy-peasy, a lot easier than dealing with FB, certainly. The place is like a favor bank where you make deposits without any chance of withdrawal. Somebody’s telling me about some event they want the whole world to know about but I need to sign in again today? Why’s that? And Facebook always asks if I want to make FB my homepage – why on Earth would I do that?

Is there some way to stop getting queried by FB about making it my browser start page?

Yes there is. You just need to cancel your account, forever. Here’s the response you’ll get when you click on Settings/ Cancel:

Doesn’t that just tug at your heart-strings? Somehow, I think lovely Damion and Fiona will manage just fine without me. And actually, they probably won’t even notice I’m gone since nobody’s going to send a message to people saying how I don’t like them anymore or something.

Just didn’t know what I was getting into. I ended up getting messages from people I was only vaguely aware of. Maybe that’s my fault, as I would routinely accept friend requests. Well, except for one. That was from a state elected official, Betty Yee. I used to drive her around for free in a giant Lexus, but that wasn’t enough so then I started getting solicitations for campaign donations in the mail every couple of months. I think the fact that I threw a few bucks (not that much at all) to more charismatic pols irritated her. Oh well. Anyway, I thought that approving the friend request would send a mixed message, so I didn’t. (You’ll get a chance to vote for her next month, but it doesn’t really matter as she’ll win anyway due to the way the system is set up.) Otherwise, I just went with the flow with FB and I didn’t like where it took me.

Now I know a bunch of older people glommed on to FB tout de suite about a year ago – that probably raised FB’s average user age up, up, up. Do you think the age of the typical user will end up getting near what AOL’s average user age was in its prime? You might be too young to remember the era of You’ve Got Mail, but man, there are a lot of similarities betwixt AOL and FB, is all I’m saying. AOL eventually lost out to the regular Internet – when will FB lose out the regular Internet?

I’ll tell you, my grandmother is too busy for FB what with her going out and enjoying her new Hyundai (Yes, Hyundai!, – is this really America’s best warranty? No se), but what’s it going to be like when the average grandmother clocks in more FB time per day that the typical tween girl? That’s gonna be tough.

Now, here’s a bit from Geroge Orwell. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.” How wrong was that, right? Here’s the Future:

(A frat-boy style lexicon of love that might have been appropriate back in the day, back around aught-four, might need to be tweaked a bit, at some point, you think? Moving on…)

AOL’s downward spiral began just after that You’ve Got Mail Tom Hanks / Melanie Griffith joint came out in 1998. How long will FB last after The Social Network comes out in late 2010? Will the kids think you’re cool still after that, FB? You might not be The New Thang after that.

Oh well.

And oh yes, after boldly informing FB about how you really meant it when you clicked on Cancel, they’ll have you log in again and make you pass a CAPTCHA. And then this screen is your payday. But you have to tell them why you’re leaving. Thusly: